Terminally Ill Patient ‘Cured’ of Immune Illness After AI IDs Drug for ‘Repurposing’

A patient with the rare disease idiopathic multicentric Castleman’s disease (iMCD) is alive and has been in remission for two years since he was treated with a medication predicted by an AI platform to be the top drug for his condition. The clinical trial, led by David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, an assistant professor of Translational Medicine & Human Genetics, combined the platform’s analysis with labwork which identified a potential new target for treatment in iMCD. “There are probably a few hundred patients in the United States and few thousand patients around the world who, each year, are in the midst of a deadly flare-up like this patient had been experiencing...I’m hopeful that many of them could benefit from this new treatment,” Fajgenbaum said.